Timeless Time and Placeless Place (Yom Kippur 5787)

Timeless Time and Placeless Place (Yom Kippur 5787)

Sep 16, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Over the summer I sat my eldest son down for an important conversation. “Listen,” I said, and proceeded to play a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the closing section of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

Jonah was a film major in college and, former music major that I am, I have taken it upon myself to ensure that he knows something about the classical roots on which movie composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer draw. In addition to that, I had made a summer project for myself of listening to the complete Mahler symphony recordings that Bernstein made in the last decade of his life, which are among the cultural treasures of the late twentieth century.

In case you don’t know Mahler’s Third (or even if you do), listen here starting about 1:37:00. (Still Bernstein conducting, but a different recording.) It’s gorgeous. Mahler described it as the song of divine love. And if you listen starting at 1:43:30, over the next 30 seconds you’ll hear just about the most beautiful, full resolution of anything in your life. The music comes home, emphatically, to a D-Major chord that just goes on and on, reinforced by thumping timpani. This is a triumphant homecoming into a divine embrace. If you experience tears, they are likely tears of joy at the magnificence of the sound.

In the years after he composed the Third, Mahler suffered quite a bit: a near-death illness, the loss of a child, and continuing health problems. All of that affected his music. By the time he composed his Ninth Symphony a decade or so later, he was acutely aware of his mortality (and, in fact, he died the following year). If you listen to the final minutes (here’s Bernstein again; start around 1:18:00), you may find it conveys a kind of homecoming into a divine embrace, but in a very different way.

Mahler referred to this adagio movement as his farewell to the world, and thus there is nothing grand or triumphant here. No brass or timpani, just the faint sound of small gestures in the strings, the last gentle breaths of a human life. And there’s only the subtlest of resolutions: the violins end on an A-flat, part of the final D-flat Major chord but markedly not its home note, as though they are hanging in the ether. When performed live, the ending is one of the most magical moments in a concert hall, as thousands of people—including the musicians and the conductor—are in a netherworld, not knowing whether the music is still going or whether it has ended. If tears come, they are tears of a sadder, wiser sort.

Mahler famously observed, “I am thrice homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” Yet he wrote these symphonies in which homecoming is such a profound theme. In this season of teshuva—returning to our deepest sense of home—I find myself reflecting on him, on the contrasting endings of these two symphonies, and what they might help us understand about our own experience of finding our way home.

“The paths of teshuva,” writes Maimonides (Laws of Repentance 2:4), include calling out to God, giving charity, changing our actions, and changing our names (“as if to say, ‘I am a different person’”). Finally, and perhaps summarily, one may “exile oneself from one’s home. Exile atones for sin because it causes a person to be submissive, humble, and meek of spirit.”

While the first part of the Rambam’s list is drawn from one Talmudic passage (Rosh Hashanah 16b), the last part quotes another (Sanhedrin 37b), which records three opinions about the efficacy of exile: The first says it atones for half a sin, the second for a whole sin, and the third, attributed to Rabbi Yochanan, says “exile atones for all transgressions.” Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, perhaps with Maimonides in mind, explains Rabbi Yochanan to mean that exile “renders the sinner like a new person.”

Exile is the polar opposite of being at home. Yet, the Rambam teaches, it is potentially a necessary part of the spiritual journey of homecoming. Part of the task of this season between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is to discern whether we are at home—and if not, what, if any, forms of exile the route home might entail.

“Where penitents (ba’alei teshuva) stand, the completely righteous cannot stand” (Brachot 34b). Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa comments: “A completely righteous person—that is, one who sees themselves as entirely complete and perfect in their words and actions—such a person is at a lower level than a penitent whose heart is broken within them.”

While Reb Simcha Bunim doesn’t use the words exile and home here, I think we can hear him playing in a similar key: If we are so sure that we are at home—in control of our lives and thus happy and satisfied with our own goodness—it could well be that we’re fooling ourselves. Look a little harder, perhaps. There is always more teshuva to do.

And yet we also need that self-assurance. We need to know we’re at home. As the Mishnah says about the search for chametz in our homes on the night before Pesach, we have to draw a line somewhere, otherwise ein l’davar sof, there would be no end.

In the conclusion of Mahler’s Third, I hear a homecoming that is strong and sturdy, a sense of home that doesn’t second-guess itself. At times we need that sense of at-homeness. Yet the end of Mahler’s Ninth offers a softer, subtler, perhaps more mature kind of homecoming, one that is sure of itself but doesn’t broadcast it, something more akin to the words of Rabbi Shefa Gold’s classic chant: “I am resting in this Divine embrace, timeless time and placeless place.”

Among the opportunities Yom Kippur invites us into is a rehearsal of our own death. That is one of the ways to understand abstaining from the quintessential physical behaviors that make us human: eating and drinking, wearing shoes, bathing, having sex, on top of the observances of Shabbat. On one level, that prefiguring of death is an experience of exile from our regular lives. On another, the exile opens up a path to come home—reborn, renewed, and capable of allowing our lives to be a sukkat shalom: a home gently holding and held in a Divine embrace. May we find our way to that home this year.

For Reflection & Conversation:

  • As you listen to the endings of Mahler’s Third and Ninth Symphonies, what do you hear in them? If you hear a kind of homecoming, what does that evoke for you—and how might it inform your experience of Yom Kippur?

A Broken Heart, A Stable Home (Rosh Hashanah 5786)

A Broken Heart, A Stable Home (Rosh Hashanah 5786)

Sep 9, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

In recent days, several friends have forwarded me an article from The Atlantic. It’s by Olga Khazan and it highlights the work of Willoughby Britton, a former academic researcher who has raised questions about potential negative health effects of meditation in some individuals. For Britton herself, and it would appear for some other folks too, meditation—most often in large doses of hours a day, as is often done on retreat—has contributed to difficulty sleeping, increased anxiety, and even psychosis, i.e. really serious stuff.

To me, the article read as more than a bit tendentious (In non-academese: it felt like Khazan had an ax to grind). Britton’s data set is, by her own admission, astonishingly small, yet the article implied broad conclusions from it, despite a requisite nod to the overwhelming number of studies demonstrating the positive effects of meditation practice. Choice quotes seemed to be deployed to make major meditation teachers look bad. Some who were left unnamed were quoted as telling participants suffering negative experiences on retreat to “just keep meditating,” advice which may have been normative a couple of decades ago but which, at least at IJS and among the folks I know, would not be given now.

(Indeed, one of the ironies here is that our faculty at IJS, along with many other teachers in the mindfulness meditation world, have worked hard to learn about and use trauma-informed pedagogies—including through training with Cheetah House, the organization that Britton founded and leads.)

But my point in bringing this up is not to offer a defensive rejoinder to the Atlantic article. It is rather to observe the process that followed the stimulus of encountering it. Because, as we observe Rosh Hashanah, I think it’s a great opportunity for some reflection.

I’m going to go out on a limb and conjecture at part of the dynamic in this case. It involves encountering a story in the news media—particularly in a publication that codes as college educated, politically liberal, smart, and yes, to many Jews, Jewish (the New York Times and The New Yorker are neighbors to The Atlantic in this media zip code). For not a few folks, if a claim is printed in one of these publications, then it takes on a kind of weight or truth. We instinctively give it the benefit of the doubt, before our minds have even had a chance to decide.

But in a case like this, that process collides with another belief: We trust meditation. We know from our own experience that it has been helpful in our lives. And, if you’re reading this, it might also be that you believe in IJS, you trust our teachers, you might even contribute to us (it’s never too late, btw). So there’s some motivated reasoning already churning in the background, and that can lead to a feeling of internal destabilization and conflict: We want to believe both of these things, but they seem to be diametrically opposed, and holding two truths can feel like it will break us apart on some level.

As my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius might say, “What an opportunity for practice!”

Regular readers will know that I’ve intentionally been writing about the experience of feeling at home for the last several months. (We also just wrapped up a 10-part miniseries on this topic over at the Soulful Jewish Living podcast.)

Regular readers may also know that one of my longstanding Elul practices is listening to a recording of the poet David Whyte. On this year’s encounter with it, my ear alit on a line in the final poem on the album, which is called Coleman’s Bed, in reference to a cave in the Burren region of County Clare. After inviting the reader/listener to “make a nest now” like Saint Kevin, who is said to have held his hands up long enough for a mother bird to have laid her egg and for the offspring to have hatched and flown away, Whyte writes:

and then bring in from those horizons
all discordant elements that seek a home.

Home, in this rendering, is a place or state of being in which “discordant elements” can reside together. That is different from the idea of home as a place of uniformity or homogeneity. In fact, it might even be a near total inversion: When we are at home, we feel strong and secure enough to contain multitudes (to quote another poet). Or, to turn it one more time, if we are able to hold contradictions, that’s a good sign we’re feeling at home.

Whyte continues:

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

Another definition of home here, though very much related to the first: Home is a state of being in which we can welcome guests—even, as Rumi might suggest, parts of ourselves. It is a place in which we can hold separation and brokenness within a larger frame of wholeness.

On Rosh Hashanah, that inevitably brings us to the shofar and the brokenness-inside-wholeness of the shofar blasts. The fact that the middle blasts are called shevarim, broken, has been the genesis of many a sermon. It connects us to the midrashic story that the broken first set of tablets were placed inside the Ark along with the whole ones, which the Talmud then connects to the way we continue to honor sages even when, in old age, they have forgotten their Torah (a poignant note for those of us caring for elders with dementia). And, of course, it can take us to the Kotzker Rebbe’s classic teaching: There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav had his own Torah of brokenness. One of his stories, quoted in the Itturei Torah of Rabbi Aharon Greenberg (an indispensable resource I refer to weekly), comments on the verse that introduces the shofar service: “Happy is the people that knows the teruah” (Psalms 89:16). Rebbe Nachman glosses: That is, “Who know the wisdom of a broken heart (shevirat ha-lev).”

He offers a parable:

A king sent his son far away to learn the seven wisdoms of the world. When the son returned full and filled with wisdom, the father wished to test him. He commanded him to lift a large stone to the top of the mountain. The son mustered all his strength and rolled the stone up the slope of the mountain, and after great effort, brought it up to the peak.

When he came to his father and recounted his immense toil in rolling the stone, the father shook his head and said: “Is this your wisdom? What entered your mind to carry a stone so hard and heavy to the top of the mountain? You should have broken it into small pieces, and then it would have been easy for you to carry it to its place.

Rebbe Nachman concludes: “The Holy One commanded us to lift our heart—which is hard and heavy like stone—and the best advice is to break the heart of stone and shatter it into fragments (shevarim).”

This is the anti-Sisyphus: There is no nobility in the endless struggle to exert brute force to move the boulder up the mountain. Rather, genuine wisdom comes through what Whyte might refer to as a “robust vulnerability”: Allowing the heart to break open, not expecting perfection. It is precisely in the letting go, the seeming surrender, the brokenness, that we can encounter a greater wholeness, a deeper experience of home.

“Above all, be alone with it all,” continues David Whyte, “a hiving off, a corner of silence amidst the noise.” The silence, perhaps, between the blasts of the shofar. (To you shofar-blowers out there: perhaps there’s no need to rush. The silence has as much to offer as the sound.) He concludes with an image that, to me, evokes our ritual of Tashlikh, when we cast our sins into a moving body of water:

Become the source that makes
the river flow, and then the sea
beyond.

The sea is distinguished in being both container and that which we aim to contain. Which perhaps makes it a metaphor for the mind, or for our very sense of self (Spelled in reverse, yam, sea in Hebrew, is mi, who—as in, Who are you?)

To return to where we started: Of course meditation can have a shadow side. Everything can. That is one way to understand the story of eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which our progenitors did within moments of their creation, on Rosh Hashanah. As a result, multiplicity, contradiction, paradox, and the challenges—and opportunities—of living with them are hard-wired into the human condition.

On balance, there is little question in my mind that practicing to live with mindful awareness brings far more good into the world than not doing so. So as we begin this new year, I bless us all with the ability to allow our hearts to break open, to hold the pieces lightly and with care, to lovingly support each other on the journey up the mountain and toward the sea.

Teshuva Is a Compassionate Heart (Nitzavim-Vayelekh 5786)

Teshuva Is a Compassionate Heart (Nitzavim-Vayelekh 5786)

Sep 3, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

I had a couple hours between the end of a senior staff offsite meeting in Atlanta and my flight home to Chicago. My colleague Firkins wanted to visit the National Center for Civil and Human Rights before, so we went together and spent 90 minutes there on the way to the airport.

This was my second trip to the museum. My first visit was eight years ago, before I began a regular meditation practice. Of the many powerful exhibits, the one I remembered the most was a simulation of the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins, which the museum’s website describes thus: “Visitors are invited to participate in a lunch counter sit-in simulation and place themselves in the shoes of non-violent protestors in 1960.”

What does that mean? You put on a pair of headphones and listen as an angry mob yells at you, pushes you (the chair vibrates), and makes you feel increasingly unsafe. Though the simulation lasts 85 seconds, many visitors take off their headphones before that because it’s frankly really intense. There’s even a space with comfy chairs and kleenex to decompress after you’re done.

On my first visit, I definitely didn’t make it through the full time (which, of course, is a fraction of what the activists themselves endured). But on this visit, I sat through the whole thing, buoyed both by my knowledge of what was coming and also by preparing myself with a short meditation before putting on the headphones, which I continued as the simulated violence got more intense.

On a wall near the lunch counter were some notes from a CORE training session on nonviolence. There is so much wisdom here:

I was particularly intrigued by two items here. The first was the attitude the protesters were trained to adopt: “Serious. Committed. Believe. Passion (for the issue, not against other people). Calm confidence.” As much as anything, that reflects a profound and mature spirituality, what Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz referred to as the yishuv hada’at, or calm, settled mind, of the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh’s decree.

The second thing that grabbed me was the emphasis on song: “Creating unity, easing fear, establishing moral superiority, forcing attackers to deal with demonstrators as a group rather than focus on an individual… Everyone sings, no exceptions. If you can’t sing, sing louder.” This reminded me of Moses’s words in Parashat Vayelekh: “And when many evils and troubles have come upon them, this song shall confront them as a witness, for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring” (Deuteronomy 31:21). Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav comments, “By means of this song one can awaken goodness from wherever one finds oneself, even at the end of these many generations, such that one can remember their inherent virtue and return to their deep spiritual roots.”

Another exhibit about Martin Luther King’s antipoverty work featured a quote from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture: “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.” That brought to mind another powerful teaching, from the early Hasidic master Rabbi Shmelke Halevi Horowitz of Nikolsburg (1726-1778). It comes on the verse, “Then YHVH your God will return your captivity and have compassion upon you…” (Deuteronomy 30:3). The rebbe comments, “A sign of a person’s teshuva (repentance/return) is whether they conduct themselves with the attribute of compassion (midat harachamim). For transgressions generate cruelty in a person’s heart, whereas it is written: “Then YHVH your God will return your captivity—and compassion will come upon you.”

I love that this teaching brings the question of teshuva out of the theological realm and into the profoundly personal. How do we know if we’ve done genuine teshuva, if we’ve really returned to the paths of peace that are the paths of Torah? One good indication is whether our hearts are soft, open, and compassionate, or hard, closed, and angry. If we’ve really done the work of teshuva, then we should be able to feel it in our hearts. If we can’t, then there is probably still more work to do.

In that spirit, one final item at the museum spoke to me on this visit. It was a video of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 speech to Congress advocating for passage of the Voting Rights Act. One of the most moving parts of that speech was when Johnson said this: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” As the exhibit at the museum reminds viewers, Martin Luther King was said to have been moved to tears when he heard the President say these words.

“You stand this day, all of you, before YHVH your God,” says Moses, “your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials—the entire body of Israel—your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to waterdrawer” (Deuteronomy 29:9-10). In other words, it takes all of us. No group of people—not African-Americans, not Jews, not Muslims, not anyone—should be made to sacrifice themselves for another. Rather, as the phrase goes, none of us is free until all of us is free.

It can sometimes feel like we’re a long way from that: When politicians call for Jews to sacrifice our own safety for the greater good, when our fellow Jews wantonly assault Palestinians in a warped and dangerous perversion of Torah, when we’re reminded of how long and how much the struggle for human dignity and equality can take.

Yet, as Rebbe Nachman teaches, it is precisely in such moments that we can turn to “this song”—the song of Torah, the song of our tradition, the song of our spiritual practice, to help us reconnect with our spiritual roots. That is the essence of teshuva, the essence of this season.

For Reflection & Conversation

      • What do you make of Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg’s teaching that a sign of teshuva is behaving with more compassion? Is that a helpful approach to the idea of spiritual returning and repentance? How, if at all, does it differ from other conceptions you’ve encountered?
You Can’t Take It With You (Ki Tavo 5786)

You Can’t Take It With You (Ki Tavo 5786)

Aug 28, 2026 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Two decades ago, after leaving the Wall Street Journal, one of my wife Natalie’s first jobs in the Jewish world was working for a nascent project at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to send Jewish children’s books to families every month.

The idea was brilliantly simple: Children want their parents to read to them at bedtime. If they get a book in the mail with their name on it, they’ll run to their parent and beg/demand for them to read it. Fertile soil. Now plant the seed of a story about Shabbat, Jewish holidays, or the like, and you’ve created a moment of Jewish education that may not have existed before.

For its first five years, Natalie led the book selection committee. She worked with authors and illustrators and publishers. It wasn’t a simple process (and still isn’t), and she certainly learned that you can’t satisfy everyone.

Natalie eventually went on to other work. But over the last 21 years, the PJ Library has reached 670,000 Jewish families and shipped over 50 million books. And evaluation research has shown that many of them are significantly more engaged in Jewish life and Jewish education as a result. Pretty amazing.

Harold Grinspoon has long shared that the idea for PJ came from Dolly Parton, who passed away this week. In case you missed it, one of Dolly’s most significant legacies is her Imagination Library, a program that sends over 3 million children’s books every month to kids who might not have them otherwise. And that’s just part of her philanthropic legacy, which has included education, direct aid to people in poverty, medical research, and disaster recovery. I kind of wish that one of the many headlines about her this week had read, “Major philanthropist and humanitarian, who was also a great songwriter, entertainer, and feminist, dies at age 80.”

“And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you” (Deuteronomy 28:2). So says Moses as he sums up his second major address in the final book of the torah. Rabbi Shaul Yedidya Elazar Taub, the second Modzitzer Rebbe (1886-1947), observes that the word v’hisigucha, “overtake you,” seems redundant: if the blessings come upon you, isn’t it obvious that they will reach you?

“Rather,” he says, “there are those whom the Ineffable has blessed with fortune, wealth, and abundant blessings, but who lack the proper understanding (hasaga) of how to use their wealth and goodness. In that case, their wealth it is not a blessing to them. Therefore, the Torah says v’hisigucha from the language of hasaga: that you should also possess the understanding of how to conduct yourself properly with your wealth. This understanding itself is one of the blessings.”

Wealth, and knowing what to do with it, has long been a challenge of human life, and it remains so today. The Wall Street Journal, my wife’s old employer, recently ran an article about “landmaxxing,” with the opening line: “It is no longer enough for the superrich to own one mansion on a street. Now, they want two or three—and sometimes the entire block.” From Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane to the billionaires of today, it seems that in every generation we humans have to re-learn Hillel’s maxim, “The greater your possessions, the greater your worry.” Or, in the words of Notorious B.I.G., “Mo Money, Mo Problems.”

Why, despite all the blessings that wealth might bring, does it take an extra blessing of insight to live well with it? Perhaps because wealth is just like everything else in life: You can’t take it with you. “Every moment of our lives, our suffering, our clinging to our lives, drives us out of our lives—away from home,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew. Wealth, the desire for it and the fear of losing it once we have it, is one of those things a lot of human beings cling to. More than the wealth itself, it’s that clinging that’s the real problem.

It takes spiritual effort to recognize that the clinging is even going on. As Alan Lew continues, “Every moment, our awareness brings us back—returns us to ourselves, because we need to return, need to come back.” Perhaps that’s why we read this verse just before Rosh Hashanah, to help us discern what we’re clinging to and the ways we’re clinging to it.

My friend David Geller, a retired wealth advisor and alum of our Kivvun program, asks wealthy people to imagine their funeral. One version of the funeral is that people give the usual eulogies about what an accomplished person the departed was. Some family members speak. It’s lovely and touching.

The other version of the funeral includes not only the family, but the director of the local food pantry, who talks about the thousands of people the deceased helped to feed, or the principal of the school who shares how many children their wealth helped to teach, or the rabbi (or head of a Jewish mindfulness organization?) who lovingly remembers how their financial gifts helped so many people connect with their roots and live meaningful lives. (David has a terrific blog on this stuff that you should subscribe to.)

My grandfather Hymie used to say, “Rich or poor, it’s good to have money.” That’s true. It’s also true that money can’t buy happiness (or love, per the Beatles). For that, spiritual practice is required, no matter how much or how little we might imagine we possess.

For Reflection & Conversation

  • How do you feel about your relationship with money? Do you feel a sense of clinging when money comes up? Or perhaps security, openness, or generosity? As we move towards Rosh Hashanah, how might you want to improve your relationship with wealth and money in the coming year? How might your spiritual practice help you do so?
How to Become a Shofar of Justice and Love

How to Become a Shofar of Justice and Love

Aug 25, 2026 | Blog, by Rabbi Marc Margolius, Senior Core Faculty and Senior Advisor, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Throughout the month of Elul, the shofar invites us to crack open our hearts and soften our defenses. It calls us to attend more fully to the pain of the world. And it invites us to cultivate our capacity to respond to this pain with more compassion for ourselves and others. Ultimately, this is our intention: to imagine our very selves as a shofar, a living instrument through which the Divine Voice might flow.

The shofar can awaken us to a sacred voice within us yearning to repair that which is broken, and elevate our own voices and, in speech and deed, promote justice, love, and wholeness in this broken world.   

A foundational text for this practice comes from the prophet Isaiah, and is part of the traditional prophetic reading for Yom Kippur. God instructs the prophet (58:1-10)  to speak to the Israelites, in language that inspires our practice:

קְרָא בְגָרוֹן אַל־תַּחְשֹׂךְ כַּשּׁוֹפָר הָרֵם קוֹלֶךָ וְהַגֵּד לְעַמִּי פִּשְׁעָם וּלְבֵית יַעֲקֹב חַטֹּאתָם׃

Cry with a full throat, don’t hold back; raise your voice like a shofar! Declare to My people their transgression, to the House of Jacob their sin.

The people ask: why isn’t God pleased by their piety and their fasting? After all, they claim, they are seeking God, and searching to know the right direction. They ask God:

Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, why did You pay no attention?

God answers:

Because on your fast day you go about your business and you oppress your workers. Because you fast in strife and contention, and you strike with a wicked fist! When you fast as you do today, your voice cannot be heard on high. 

Is such the fast I desire, a day for humans to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when YHVH is favorable?

No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke; to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin.

Then shall your light burst through like the dawn and your healing spring up quickly; Your Vindicator shall march before you, the Presence of YHVH shall be your rear guard. Then, when you call, YHVH will answer; When you cry, God will say: Hineini, here I am. If you banish the yoke from your midst, the menacing hand, and evil speech, and you offer your compassion to the hungry and satisfy the famished — then shall your light shine in darkness, your gloom shall be like noon.

Isaiah teaches us to imagine our very being as a shofar, a vessel through which the Divine can flow. When we soften our defenses, cultivate more spaciousness within us, release our self-focus, empathize with the pain of others, and access our capacity for compassion, we can become klei kodesh, instruments in a sacred orchestra. 

From Isaiah, we learn to discern in the vibrations of the shofar a Voice yearning to flow through us that expresses the hopes, dreams, and needs of the vulnerable. The insight spurs us to “lift our voices like a shofar,” in word or deed, addressing the brokenness of our world, and generating actions to promote tzedek v’shalom, justice and wholeness. 

The shofar awakens each of us to an ever-present kol demamah dakah, a still small voice, within us. It urges us to lift up that Voice, to amplify its message, to help bend the long moral arc of the universe towards justice, even if only a little.  

The enormous brokenness of our world can overwhelm us. It can render us feeling powerless and speechless. Or, it can make us want to scream out of pent-up anger and frustration.  But our practice of attuning to the shofar over the month of Elul helps us understand the shofar as a conduit for the sacred flow of love, compassion, and justice. 

Like Isaiah, the late Congressman John Lewis implored us to lift our voices like a shofar. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just,” he said, “you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.” John Lewis taught that when we allow the sacred wind, the spirit of God, to flow through us, we will be guided by “the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love.”

Over the course of Elul, the shofar helps us cultivate openness, empathy, and compassion. As we enter the momentous year of 5787, May the shofar awaken us to our capacity to lift our voices for justice, and to infuse our words with love.

Reflection questions for practice:

      1. What, if anything, gets in the way of your ability to speak when you witness that which you experience as wrong or unjust? How might your practice help you dissolve those obstructions, so that you might amplify the “still small voice” of justice within you?
      2. When you speak in response to small or large injustices, do you tend to speak from annoyance or anger? What might help you infuse your words with empathy and love, so that they might reflect the Voice which “waters the garden?